High Profile Liars

What American has time to read fiction, when the culture produces an almost daily regimen of high-profile liars, celebrity convicts and fake news reports signed off by the Bush administration?

This week’s poster boy for moral decrepitude is disgraced baseball legend Mark McGwire.

Called before a U.S. Congressional hearing on Thursday to answer formal charges that he used performance enhancing steroids during his career, McGwire dodged the questions
repeatedly.

Instead of providing honesty, McGwire drove his reputation off a cliff, and his legacy should be irreparably shattered.

Lucky for McGwire, he’s part of contemporary American culture; otherwise he would go down in flames and his record breaking 70 home runs in 1998 would be expunged from history.

Recently, it was Happy Homecoming for the convicted stock fraudster – and still under house arrest – Martha Stewart. There’s been the usual media heavy-breathing effort to hype her emergence from jail as the heartwarming comeback of a born-again humanitarian.

Will handing out hot cocoa to reporters at her Bedford, N.Y., estate turn the tide for Martha? Probably.

Let’s not overlook the completely unrepentant former Enron CEO Ken Lay, who still purports on 60 Minutes that he's an innocent victim.

And, now for the Ministry of Truth, there’s the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that the Bush Administration spent $254 million in its first four years on contracts with public relations firms to produce fake TV reports.

The GAO has declared that video news releases - or prepackaged TV segments - that fail to reveal they were produced by the government – at taxpayer expense, constitute illegal propaganda.

Not surprisingly, Bush’s Justice Department has rebuked the GAO report, telling federal agencies to ignore the findings and recommendations. Welcome to the United States of Amnesia.

Deceiving the American people about government policies and proposals goes hand-in-hand with fallen role models from the sports and entertainment world.

The results of a Harris Interactive Poll in mid-February are particularly disturbing. The topic was: "Iraq, 9/11, Al Qaeda and Weapons of Mass Destruction: What the Public Believes Now."

While the poll offered some interesting survey statistics about what Americans believe about the war in Iraq, how long we should keep troops in that country, and if Iraqis are better off now than they were when Saddam Hussein was in charge, it also contained some very disturbing numbers about other things that Americans believe:

* 64 percent believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda (up slightly from
62% in November).
* 47 percent believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who
attacked the US on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November).
* 44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the US on
September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37% in November).
* 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded
(down slightly from 38% in November).

These statistics are staggering.

Significant numbers of people in the United States, (almost two-thirds in the case of the first item) believe things that are just not true, have been repeatedly shown to be not true, have been repudiated by the White House, the 9/11 commission, the people hired by the US to find WMD, the United Nations, Chris Rock, the United Federation of Planets, you name it. And most of the numbers are going up.

There are only two possible explanations for this stunning lack of knowledge: an impressive number of Americans have chased too many parked cars – as they say in Oklahoma, or the problem is the sources they are using to get their news - or what they mistake for news.

All the feng shui in China cannot sweeten the moral rot of America, which is now de rigueur – from top-to-bottom.